A Chinese rocket body streaking across the night sky over the western United States lit up social media as people shared photos and video of the bright object. The Chinese CZ-7 re-entered the atmosphere Wednesday night, U.S. Strategic Command spokeswoman Julie Ziegenhorn confirmed. That’s when people in Nevada, Utah and California took to social media […]

July 15, 2016 The first mission to fly around the moon was Apollo 8 in 1968. … As they successfully went into lunar orbit, astronaut William Anders snapped the famous Earthrise photo that was printed in Life Magazine. As Apollo 8’s three man crew looked down on the earth from 250,000 miles away on Christmas […]

July 4, 2016 [CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] NASA’s Juno spacecraft was to fire its main rocket engine late Monday to slow itself down from a speed of 150,000 mph (250,000 kph) and slip into orbit around Jupiter. With Juno on autopilot, the delicately choreographed move comes without any help from ground controllers. The […]

After nearly a five-year journey, Juno enjoys a perspective on Jupiter not often seen, even by spacecraft from Earth that usually swing by closer to Jupiter’s equator. Looking down toward the ruling gas giant from a distance of 10.9 million kilometers, the spacecraft’s JunoCam captured this image with Jupiter’s nightside and orbiting entourage of four […]

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute] The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. The space-based view with the Sun behind the distant world was captured by New Horizons last July. The spacecraft was at a range of over 21,000 kilometers, about 19 minutes after its closest […]

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA / GSFC / Arizona State U. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Fifty years ago, Surveyor 1 reached the Moon. Launched on May 30, 1966 and landed on June 2, 1966 with the Moon at full phase it became the first U.S. spacecraft to make a soft landing on another […]

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, STS-132 Crew, Expedition 23 Crew, NASA] The International Space Station is the largest object ever constructed by humans in space. The station perimeter extends over roughly the area of a football field, although only a small fraction of this is composed of modules habitable by humans. The station is […]

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Cassini Imaging Team, SWRI, JPL, ESA, NASA] Cassini, a robot spacecraft launched in 1997 by NASA, became close enough in 2002 to resolve many rings and moons of its destination planet: Saturn. At that time, Cassini snapped several images during an engineering test. Several of those images were combined […]

Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner just announced a bold new initiative to visit Alpha Centauri — the second-closest star to Earth — within our lifetimes. “For the first time in human history we can do more than just gaze at the stars, we can actually reach them,” Milner told a crowd […]

[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA/GSFC/Arizona State U./Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] On the Moon, the Earth never rises — or sets. If you were to sit on the surface of the Moon, you would see the Earth just hang in the sky. This is because the Moon always keeps the same side toward the Earth. […]